So it’s clear video is incredibly important to the future of social media marketing. However, when it comes to video, what does “success” really mean? And how do you know if your videos are performing well on social media?

Measuring the success of your video content can be a difficult task. Especially as almost every platform has a range of features and metrics. For example, some platforms count a video view as three seconds, others count a view as soon as you open a video. Some platforms auto-play videos, others don’t. Some channels have limits of 60 seconds for video and on others it’s unlimited.

How are we supposed to keep up?

In this post, we’d love to help you navigate the world of social video metrics. We’ll break down video metrics across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat to give you a definitive guide to what you can measure on each platform, how you can measure it and importantly what each metric means.

Let’s get started.

The complete guide to social video metrics

Feel free to use the quick links to jump to the section that you are most interested in! If you want a quick overview of all the video metrics across all the platforms, check out our handy video metrics spreadsheet or the infographic below:

Metrics available:

Audience and engagement (People Reached, Post Engagement, Top Audience, and Top Location)

Facebook also provides a bunch of other metrics for the Facebook post with the video such as reactions, comments, shares, and post clicks, under “Post”.

Where to find the metrics:

There are two ways to see your Facebook video metrics.

1. Overview and Top Videos

To see the overall performance of your videos, head to your Facebook Page Insights and select “Videos” on the left column.

Here, you will see the total number of video views, total number of 10-second views, and the most viewed videos on your Page. You can customize the timeframe in the upper-right corner of the page and adjust the breakdown of the video views in the upper-right corner of each panel.

2. Individual Videos

To see the performance of individual videos, head to your Facebook Page and select “Posts” on the right column instead.

Here, you’ll find all the posts on your Facebook Page, and the video posts are easily identifiable with the video icon (). For each post, you can see the reach and engagement level and sort the posts according to reach or engagement. For engagement level, there are four options:

Post Clicks / Reactions, Comments & Shares

Reactions / Comments / Shares

Post Hides, Hides of All Posts, Reports of Spam, Unlikes of Page

Engagement Rate

To see the detailed metrics of a video post, simply click on the title of the post. Here’s what you’ll see:

You can click on each of the metrics to see more granular performance data.

Metrics available:

If you are using an Instagram business profile, you’ll get the following metrics as well:

Impressions

Reach

Engagement

Where to find the metrics:

To see the number of views and likes, simply tap on the view count of the post.

If you have a business profile on Instagram, you’ll have access to more insights. To see the number of impressions, reach, and engagement of your video, select the video you are interested in from your profile and tap on “View Insights”.

Metrics available:

If you are using an Instagram business profile, you’ll get the following metrics as well:

Impressions

Reach

Engagement

Where to find the metrics:

To see the individual performance of your Instagram Stories video, open your story and swipe up on the video you are interested in.

Here, you’ll see the number of views of your video and who viewed the video. Note that these metrics will only be available for 24 hours from the time the video is published.

If you have an Instagram business profile, Instagram now provides insights on Instagram Stories, too. You can see the reach, impressions, replies, and exits for each story with the Instagram Business Tools.

Here’s a short video on how to check out the insights on your Instagram stories:

Tip: Here are five creative metrics suggested by Dash Hudson you can use to measure the performance of your Instagram stories.

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5. Instagram Live

Video view: Once someone joins the broadcast

Following Facebook’s push for live videos, Instagram has also launched live videos last November.

Unlike Facebook Live or Periscope, Instagram live videos are not viewable or saved after the live-streaming has ended. Hence, Instagram sends your followers a notification whenever you go live.

Specs:

What counts as a view? Once someone joins the broadcast

Auto-plays? No

Auto-loops? No

Default audio state: Muted

Maximum length: 60 minutes

Embeddable outside platform? No

View counts for public? Yes (Number of live viewers)

View counts for owner? Yes (Number of live viewers)

Analytics dashboard for videos? No

Metrics available:

Live viewers at any given time

Viewers

Where to find the metrics:

The number of live viewers is shown in the upper-left corner of the screen when you go live:

When you end your live video, Instagram will tell you the number of viewers who have watched any part of your live video.

Tip: These metrics will not be available after your live video ends. It might be a good idea to take screenshots of them before closing your Instagram app.

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6. Snapchat Stories

Video view: Upon opening

More than 10 billion Stories are watched on Snapchat every day. This number would likely have increased with the launch of Spectacles as more people use Snapchat to share their daily experiences.

Specs:

What counts as a view? Upon opening the snap

Auto-plays? Yes (between snaps of a Story)

Auto-loops? No

Default audio state: On

Maximum length: 10 seconds

Embeddable outside platform? No (But there’s a third party app that allows you to do so.)

View counts for public? No

View counts for owner? Yes

Analytics dashboard for videos? No

Metrics available:

Views (and who viewed the snap)

Screenshots (and who took a screenshot of the snap)

Where to find the metrics:

Getting analytics for your snaps is still a little tricky at the moment as Snapchat does not provide any native analytics. For now, tools like Snaplytics could be helpful if you have the budget for it.

Otherwise, manually collecting the data from each of your snaps is workable, too! Open one of your snaps and swipe up.

The number below the eye symbol represents the number of people who have viewed that snap while the number below the overlapping arrows symbol represents the number of people who have taken a screenshot of that snap.

The names in white are the people who have viewed that snap, and the names in green are the people who have viewed and taken a screenshot of the snap. If many people have viewed your snap (yay!), the list might not display all the names.

Tip: Here are eight Snapchat metrics suggested by Mike Delgado that you can put together to evaluate your Snapchat performance.

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7. Twitter video

Video view: 3 seconds or more

According to Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s VP revenue product, videos are 6X more likely to be retweeted than photos and 3X more likely than GIFs.

Metrics available:

Completion rate (i.e. Total number of completed views divided by total number of video starts)

Where to find the metrics:

To find out the number of impressions, media views, and engagement for each video, click on the graph icon (i.e. View Tweet activity) on the tweet.

Here’s an example of what you’ll see:

To see the number of views and completion rate of your videos, visit your Twitter analytics’ video section. Here are the quick steps to get there:

Click on your profile photo on the upper-left corner of the page.

Select “Analytics”.

Select “More” on the top navigation bar of the analytics page.

Select “Video (beta)”.

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8. Periscope

Video view: Upon pressing play or 3 seconds after auto-play

Periscope is probably the first live-streaming app from any of the major social media platforms. After Twitter acquired the company, Periscope has been integrated into the Twitter app. You can view and create live videos from within the Twitter app.

Here’s how a Periscope looks like in Twitter:

Specs:

What counts as a view? As soon as someone press play or join a broadcast fullscreen or three seconds after a video starts to auto-play. Replays are considered as views, too. (For a more detailed explanation, check out this article by Periscope.)

Auto-plays? Yes for live broadcasts on Twitter feed (Replays do not auto-play.)

How to create your own metrics

While each social media platform provides several metrics natively, you don’t have to stick to them. You can also combine two or more of them to create metrics that are helpful for your measurement.

For example, Snapchat only provides the number of views and screenshots per snap. By dividing the number of people who have viewed the last snap of your story with the number of people who have viewed the first snap of your story, you can get the completion rate of your story (i.e. the percentage of your followers who view all the snaps in your story). This can be used for Instagram Stories as well.

For Instagram, you could add up the views of all your videos within a month and divide it by the number of videos uploaded that month to get the average number of views.

This helps to ensure that the metrics you are measuring are relevant to your social media goals, instead of similar what’s provided by the social media platform.

Over to you: What is your favorite type of video?

Video marketing on social media is on the rise, and we think there are a lot of opportunities with social videos in 2017 and beyond.

What is your favorite type of video among those listed above? What level of engagement have you been seeing from your social videos?